Civic Model Minority?
A broader question then becomes how does this affect mainstream American society and Asian American society as a whole outside these church groups? One aspect of many religious organizations is the charity work they do to help the larger society. This was the subject of Ecklund and Park’s 6 study mentioned previously in which they looked at Asian American Community and Religion and whether Asians were a “civic model minority.” They found this not to be true. Despite increases in educational attainment and income levels, Asian Americans were no more likely to volunteer in their community. Instead, education was found to actually inhibit civic participation. However, individuals who participated in a center of worship were 3.81 times more likely to volunteer when controlled for age, gender, class, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. Perhaps the sense of purpose and identity developed through religious participation better enables Asian Americans to reach out to others. However, overall the actual proportion of Asian Americans who volunteer is rather small for their socio-economic status. This might be attributed to the fact that Alumkal’s study 2 found that church members did not tend to think of other social issues that were not church related. The solution to this may be to open a dialogue with pastors to encourage congregation members to be more civically active in helping the community.
Future Generations
The other issue is how the growing number of second-, third-, and fourth-generation Asian Americans will worship. While the Asian American church can help reduce intergenerational conflict by teaching ethnic values from the first-generation to the second-generation, there was some tension expressed by the first-generation to opening up to others outside their respective ethnic groups. The English second-generation congregations were more open to accepting other Asians outside their ethnic group. At both UCLA and USC the Christian groups tend to have more mixing among ethnic groups to form Pan Asian congregations. These latter generations have more in common with other Asian Americans than their parents’ generation did. They share a common language, English. They can also shed “cultural baggage” and focus on being with others who share similar professional status and “lifestyle affinities.” 8 This may represent, or itself be fostering, a new Pan Asian identity developing within Asian American society as a whole through the formation of Pan Asian friend networks.
Conclusion
The Asian American church serves as a site for Asian immigrants to pass on their ethnic values to the next generation while living in a Western society. It also functions as a community for Asian Americans to be with others who have shared their version of the American experience, and helps them negotiate their ethnic identity in relation to mainstream American society. Though recently new Asian American academics are beginning to favor the subject, more research needs to be done on this neglected but important part of Asian American identity development. It may be critical to understanding how Asian American culture is created since it is one of the few places where Asian Americans congregate together exclusively and regularly while scattered in most other parts of society.
- Jeung, R. (2002). Asian American Pan-Ethnic Formation and Congregational Culture. In P. Min & J. Kim (Eds.), Religions in Asian American: Building Faith Communities (pp. 215-243). Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira.
Asian American Religion by Daniel Yang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.